Elephant Walk (The Brigandshaw Chronicles Book 2)

by Peter Rimmer

  On the morning of the tenth day, within a short ride of the cross placed by Bartholomew Dias in the sixteenth century, he woke up to find what it was. He was happy to be home. Happy to be back in Africa. With the understanding of his euphoria coursing through his mind, he twirled a dance up the sandy beach, scattering the black-backed gulls and chasing a jackal from its hunt. The big black cape that kept off the rain twirled from his body making a skirt. The black hat was thrown at a gull high in the air.

  "I'm happy," he shouted. "I'm happy."

  When the winter sun came out from above the mist from the sea, there was mile after mile of straight sandy beach stretching in both directions. On the day that changed his life, the Atlantic was so flat, the sea washed up the beach as if a giant had sloshed a large bucket of water up the white sand. As the slosh of water retreated it left a series of high water lines with pieces of seaweed, dead crayfish shells, mussels torn by an earlier storm from the rocks and now washed ashore, and pieces of wood, many fashioned by the hand of man, mostly long dead men as the skeletons along the ragged coast were those of ships sailed by men, ancient and modern, Portuguese caravels to the new iron ships powered by steam generated by coal. The flotsam and jetsam fascinated Barend and many a day was spent walking the soft beach looking at what the sea had brought him ashore.

  Very often he was not conscious of seeing what he saw, discarding the obvious and ordinary like a good tracker looking for animal spore. Sometimes he thought of Madge but mostly of the time when they were very young and innocent of life's pain. He laughed out loud at their old jokes and remembered how happy they had been. For hours he lived again as a child as he walked the long beach, the horses left behind with the covered wagon, only the dried meat hanging from the roof vulnerable to predators.

  He had grown so used to his own company since leaving Elephant Walk eight long years ago, when he was fourteen years old, he had no conscious idea of his loneliness. Loneliness was what he was, what he had become, and he hugged the feeling of self-satisfaction he had brought about without another person's help. He was content to leave behind the baggage of other people's minds, other people's wars, and for a while, he forgot his hatred of the English. There was a whole week on the Skeleton Coast when he did not once take out the revenge in his mind and have another look at it. With the sea and the beach, and so much easy food and water, Barend delayed again and again his trek inland, the journey that would take him back deep into the African bush.

  From force of habit which went back to when he was nine years old, Barend carried a gun over his shoulder. The .375 was powerful enough to kill an elephant at one hundred yards if the shot was put through the heart. There had been rumours in Walvis Bay of desert elephant that came right down to the sea, though what they would eat was a mystery to Barend, as tufts of scrub bush that could keep a springbok alive was nothing for an elephant that needed food in tons. He had once seen a pair of lynx hunting the beach for seals with the jackals but the cats had run away. Only once, in the dark of night, he thought he heard a lion far away in the desert but he was not sure, and the wind had been blowing from the sea taking the sound.

  Sometimes he carried the rifle at the trail to relieve the ache in his shoulder. Over his chest were two crossed straps that held the leather bags resting on his hips. Attached to the back of his belt was a metal water bottle covered in strips of khaki cloth he had bought in Walvis Bay. Had he known the bottle was British Army surplus from the Anglo-Boer War he would have died of thirst before taking a drink. In the soft leather bags at his hips was enough food for a day in case he was caught in a storm and forced to take shelter among the rocks and burrows out by the sea. The food was mostly cooked tails of rock lobster and strips of dried venison.

  The crystal rock was the size of a chicken's egg. It sparkled in the sun and brought him back from his reverie to bend down and pick it up. It was far too heavy to have been washed in by the torpid sea where, in the shallows, the kelp was barely moving to the swell. The crystal was washed clean. The edges were flat and disappeared into each other like a house of cards, only solid and strangely transparent. When the sun caught a flat surface as he turned the rock on the flat of his hand, the stone came alive with an inner fire. His rock was sparkling in the sun and Barend scratched his head with his free hand, wondering what had come to him out of the sea.

  He looked around the beach for something similar and picked up three more rocks of the same type, two of them smaller and one larger than the first he had found. All four of them were washed clean by the waters of the sea and sparkled in the winter sun. Barend decided they were pretty and put them in one of his bags as a keepsake.

  Checking the sun for the time, he began to retrace his steps back to the horses, his wagon, and a good night's sleep. It had been a long day's walk along the beach. He was tired but content in himself and by the time he heard his horses neigh he had forgotten the four rocks in the small leather bag on his right hip. With the wind at his back, he knew the horses had smelt him and were calling to him with anticipated pleasure. It made him smile, quicken his pace, and begin to whistle. Tomorrow he was going to trek north until he found the first river to lead him inland across the scrub. He was hoping to find the Kunene River his father had talked to him about when he was a child sitting around the campfire in the Rhodesian bush.

  There were three men in uniform sitting against the wheel of his wagon. They were chewing dried venison they had taken from the side of his wagon and all of them were smiling. Barend lowered the rifle that could kill an elephant at one hundred yards that he had pointed at the belly of the man in the middle. His horses were eating fodder laid on the sand and ignored him, the neighing coming from a culvert in the rocks where two more horses were hitched to an army wagon. Barend's horses had never eaten such good fodder since leaving Walvis Bay. The man in the middle got up, put out his hand, and spoke in a language Barend thought to be German but which he did not understand.

  "Who are you?" Barend asked him in Afrikaans.

  "You don't by any chance speak English?" said the German. The man's uniform was different to the other two and Barend correctly surmised he was an officer.

  "Have I done something wrong?" asked Barend.

  "Of course not… Your horses smelt the fodder we carry in our wagon. We gave them some. I hope you don't mind us eating your dried meat. Very good it is. I went to Oxford for a year after university in Berlin. Father wanted me to speak English so when we win the war I can be a military administrator in England. You are Afrikaner, I presume, and you don't like the English, which is good. We must be friends. With the help of the German army you will restore your Boer republics. My name is von Stratten, Lieutenant von Stratten. German Imperial Army. At your service."

  "My name is Barend."

  "You don't have another name? Is Barend a Christian name or a surname?"

  "It is both." For some reason, he did not wish to tell anyone who he was. The rest of him was part of his other life.

  The two soldiers kept their crouched seats against the wagon and chewed the dried meat in their mouths like cows chewing the cud. The light had begun to go as the sun sank into the South Atlantic. It would be gone with minimum fuss in a matter of minutes. From out to sea, fifty feet above the ice-cold surface of the sea, the mist, a great roll of cotton wool, was rolling into the shore. Barend went to his wagon, pulled out a sheepskin jacket and put it on. The temperature was dropping one degree Fahrenheit every thirty seconds. The white, oily fur of the sheep was warm against his skin. He had walked the beach barefoot. Barend pulled on his sheepskin boots before the blanket of fog rolled in over them, cutting their world to a few yards around the wagon. The lieutenant's wagon and horses had disappeared in the fog. Barend's two horses were still eating the German fodder, oblivious to fog and cold.

  "Best we make camp together," said von Stratten. "Even an Afrikaner can get lost in the fog. I have some good German wine."

  The idea of a good G
erman wine vanished Barend's feeling of intrusion. He had not been drunk for a very long time. What the man meant about war and the Boer republics had roused his interest. The thought of revenge was again vivid in his mind.

  "I have a leg of springbok I shot three days ago hanging in my wagon. If you tell your men to light a fire I can make a spit. It will take some time to cook, but it will be worth the waiting."

  "How is it you speak such good English without a Dutch accent?"

  "My mother was English."

  "Do you like the English?" said von Stratten in alarm, annoyed he had already spoken too much.

  "I hate them."

  "Why do you hate them, Barend?"

  "They hanged my father for treason."

  "What did he do to make them do that?"

  "He went out with the Cape rebels during the Anglo-Boer War."

  "And who was your father if you do not mind me asking?"

  "General Tinus Oosthuizen."

  "Was he?" said von Stratten. He was smiling with his lips but not with his eyes. "Then you will join me in a glass of hock and drink to a brave soldier. Your father is one of my heroes. Soon we will crush the arrogance of the English and their empire."

  There was plenty of driftwood for the big fire between the tall rocks and the sand was dry to a depth of six inches. Only the infrequent great winter storms burst that far up the shore. The men took their lower rank to the other side of the fire to Barend and von Stratten. All of them had pulled on heavy clothing. There was no wind and the smoke from the fire rose into the fog that wrapped them in its cocoon.

  There was no sound from the outside world, only the crackle of the big fire that warmed them on one side and cooked the meat on the other. The venison was placed alongside the fire on a crude spit made from pieces of metal Barend had welded together in Walvis Bay. There was a handle that turned the thin rod and the leg of venison had the habit of staying in the same position. They regularly turned the spit round for the fire to cook the other side of the meat. When the top and bottom were to be cooked, they propped a forked stick under the leg of springbok. There was little or no fat and Barend had not bothered with a drip tray.

  After an hour and a half of juggling the meat against the heat of the fire, Barend carved the top slices and handed them round on the end of his long hunting knife. They ate with their fingers, the red juices flowed down their chins, and everyone was smiling. The meat sprinkled with sea salt Barend had collected from dried up rock pools over his long journey up the beach, was better than anything any of them could remember. Watching the meat cook and smelling its flavour had made them ravenously hungry.

  Barend let the meat cook another ten minutes before he sliced again and handed round slivers of meat. They had just finished the first bottle of hock. The men were drinking schnapps out of the bottle, and one of them was drunk, dropping his slice of meat in the sand that was now damp from the fog. The man wiped off the sand best he could and ate the meat. They all laughed, von Stratten opened another bottle of hock. They said "cheers" in German and Afrikaans.

  Barend sparingly sprinkled sea salt where he had carved the last slices and put the spit right over the open coals and let the meat drip for a moment into the fire before it sealed again and began to cook. The cut crystal glass which the German had produced from a conical container with the opening of the first bottle of hock, had been placed on a flat piece of rock where it was safe. He placed small pieces of driftwood on either side of the fire to give them warmth and light, picked up his glass from the rock and sat down on his buckskin mat which stopped the water rising through the six inches of dry sand. With his arms round his knees, and his chin resting on his knees close to where he could take a sip from the ready glass, he looked into the red coals of the fire and for a moment forgot that he was not alone. He was mellow, though far from drunk on half a bottle of good wine the German had left in a rock pool during the day to keep it cool. Even in the middle of nowhere the man seemed to know how to look after himself, his men and his horses.

  When he turned his head, von Stratten was looking straight into his eyes, and to stop the man seeing what he was thinking, he smiled. Apart from his father, there had been no one in his life he had been able to trust. People generally were after something, emotional like Madge, or material like the German. There was no doubt in Barend's mind the man wanted something. He let his booted feet run out to within three feet of the fire, and leaned his left elbow on the sand, leaving his right hand with the wine glass free to find his mouth. A small drop of fat fell from the diminished leg of venison and sizzled in the fire. The men on the other side of the fire were lying on their backs as close to the fire as possible. Barend rather thought one of them was asleep.

  "And what brings the German army into this desolate spot?" he asked into the fog-shrouded night. Their meeting, he was sure, had been an accident. How could there be premeditation when no one knew where he was or who he was? He had spoken to no one for weeks.

  "Can I ask you the same?"

  "I am going north to follow the Kunene River into Central Africa. If I can find it. Or, more importantly, I can recognise the right river."

  "Won't the Ovambo tell you?"

  "They may. They may also cut my throat. No one likes strangers. After strangers come invaders. The black man found that out to his detriment. When he made the missionaries welcome. There is an old joke in Rhodesia. When the missionaries told the blacks to kneel down, shut their eyes and pray to God, they did. When they opened their eyes the Union Jack was flying over their heads."

  "You were once strangers in Africa. Your people."

  They both lapsed into silence without the German answering his first question. Barend sat up straight. His left arm was going to sleep. One of the Germans began to snore. He turned the meat using the forked stick to prop the carcass where he wanted it to cook.

  After a minute of silence the German spoke again. He had taken something from his pocket and was offering it to Barend on the palm of his hand.

  "You walked the beach, you say. Ever seen anything like this washed up on the shore?"

  The small rock was the size of a pea, about a tenth of the size of the largest rock in the leather bag he had pushed under the fodder in his wagon the moment he thought no one was looking, at the same time he had put on his sheepskin coat. The German had his palm stretched taught, pushing the stone up on his pink skin. The stone was between Barend's eyes and the light of the fire. The stone burnt with an inner fire as hot as the coals of the fire only more beautiful. Quickly hooding his eyes he hoped the German had not seen his instant recognition.

  "What is it?" he asked innocently. "I've never seen anything like it before," he lied. The lie was instinctive, as was the choking of his words when he saw again what he had found only hours before on the beach. Even before the German spoke the word diamond. Barend knew what he had in his bag and his stomach lurched at the realisation and its implications.

  "It's a pure white gem diamond. If there are more than this one in German West Africa the Kaiser will be pleased. Very pleased. He will make me a captain, I think. But one swallow does not make a summer as they say."

  "Did you find it yourself?"

  "Yes I did. This morning along this stretch of the beach. You were further north. Do you comb the beach with your eyes?"

  "Always. Like walking in the bush. Even if my mind is not consciously looking, it will jolt my thoughts if something is unusual on the ground or in the surrounds. Is your diamond worth anything?"

  "I think so."

  "Are you sure it is a diamond? I know there is fool's gold. Maybe there are fool's diamonds, stones that sparkle in the fire but fall to pieces with the slightest tap. Have you tried tapping your find?"

  "I have. Hard. Many times."

  "And it did not shatter?"

  "No, and nothing chipped either. I made a cut down the side of the glass wine bottles. It's a diamond."

  "Lucky yo
u. Why not make it into a ring for your wife? A lucky omen. Finding something of value. Picking it up off the beach. I can't believe the Kaiser would be interested in one diamond the size of a garden pea. I rather think he has many more, and much bigger. Are your men asleep?"

  "They are drunk. Drunks sleep when they have had enough. It is another way of leaving their world."

  "Let us have one more cut at the meat and then I will retire to my wagon."

  "We will finish the wine."

  "If you insist. It is very good."

  "So is the meat."

  "Then we are not obliged to each other."

  von Stratten had closed the palm of his hand and put the diamond in his pocket.

  Barend's mind was screaming. 'If he's so excited by one the size of a pea what must the ones be worth in his wagon,' he thought.